Germany War Ii

On September 6, 1943, 338 B-17 "Flying Fortresses" of the American Eighth Air Force took off from England, bound for Stuttgart, Germany, to bomb Nazi weapons factories. Dense clouds obscured the targets, and one commander's critical decision to circle three times over the city---and its deadly flak---would prove disastrous. Forty-five planes went down that day, and hundreds of men were lost or missing.

On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.

In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, three million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia.

In the predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, three million men waited along a front stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Of course,Paris was not destroyed before the Allies liberated it, but it would take more than four years for them to wrest control of France from Nazi Germany after they took the country by storm in about a month in 1940. That said, it's widely overlooked today given how history played out that as the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Der Großvater erzählt dem Enkel vom Krieg - so wie er ihn erlebt hat - ohne Umschweife und verklärten Pathos. Die Fehler der Herrschenden werden stets von den einfachen Leuten mit Blut bezahlt. Das war schon zu allen Zeiten so. Nicht anders erging es einem steirischen Bergbauernsohn, der, in der Blüte seiner Jugend stehend, in den Fleischwolf der Ostfront geschmissen wurde. Das in einer Phase, wo der Krieg für das Dritte Reich so gut wie verloren war. Im Greisenalter erinnert sich der Bergbauernsohn an jene dunklen Stunden zurück, die ihn Zeit seines Lebens verfolgt haben.

In Hitler's Death, author and expert Luke Daly-Groves rigorously looks at the question: Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? Countless documentaries, newspaper articles, and internet pages written by conspiracy theorists have led the ongoing debate surrounding Hitler's last days. Historians have not yet managed to make a serious response. Until now. This book is the first attempt by an academic to return to the evidence of Hitler's suicide in order to scrutinize the most recent conspiracy arguments.

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

On the 75th anniversary of the Coventry bombing, acclaimed historian Frederick Taylor brilliantly details this momentous act and analyzes its impact on World War II and the moral quandaries it still engenders about the nature of warfare.

All his life, journalist Walter Shapiro assumed that the outlandish stories about his great-uncle Freeman were exaggerated family lore; some cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasies dreamt up to entertain the kids and venerate their larger-than-life relative. Only when he started researching Freeman Bernstein's life did he realize that his family was actually holding back.

When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler's press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in 12 years of the closest association with Hitler, requesting that it be published after his death.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

An insightful historical account, Democrat and Diplomat exposes the dark underbelly of 1930s Germany and explores the terrible burden of those who realized the horror that was to come. Dodd was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, arriving in Berlin with his wife and daughter just as Hitler assumed the chancellorship. An unlikely candidate for the job - and not President Roosevelt's first choice - Dodd quickly came to realize that the situation in Germany was far grimmer than was understood in America.

From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II. In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues...

In the space of a single night, four lives collide as Berlin staggers under the weight of British bombs. Mick, a Lancaster pilot, proposed to Grace on his last leave but one more mission stands in between him and the end of his tour. Grace harbors a secret, one which she fears might change the nature of their relationship forever. Unsure of how he will respond, she has decided to tell him upon his return. In Berlin, 700 miles away, war-weary firefighter Karl is haunted by the images he's seen both on the home front and in Russia. Now he commands of a group of teenage auxiliaries.

On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man.

Set in 1949 Paris, Slim Moran runs the Pitchipoi Agency with her Nazi Hunter boyfriend, Daniel. Their specialty: to find those lost in the last war. After a couple of easy cases, business has ground to halt, and Daniel has just gone on another manhunt this time to find the Nazi Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Slim is bored until a British spymistress asks her to find a missing woman spy long presumed dead.

Ukraine, 1923. On a small farm, two boys are born within days of each other, both Ukrainian, one Jewish. Mykhail and Asher grow up inseparable, together finding friendship, adventure and escape from the harshness of Russian rule. But after Asher’s family flees to Warsaw, their worlds are torn to shreds by the Second World War. The war brings cruelty to both boys. Although Asher finds love in Warsaw, the city is far from the haven his family sought; meanwhile Mykhail becomes a victim of the bitter struggle for Ukraine. But worse follows, in the shape of the Treblinka death camp.

Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for 50 years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author's father - a product of her grandparents' fiercely protective love - and their status as passive Nazi-sympathizers known as Mitläufer.

In Burning the Reichstag, Benjamin Hett offers a gripping account of Hitler's rise to dictatorship - one that challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played. At the scene the police arrested 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason. Though he was initially dismissed abroad as a Nazi tool, post-war historians since the 1950s have largely judged him solely guilty - a lone arsonist exploited by Hitler.